A Doorway in Fairyland

A Doorway in Fairyland

A Doorway in Fairyland is a collection of literary fairy tales by Laurence Housman, drawn together from four earlier volumes—A Farm in Fairyland (1894), The House of Joy (1895), The Field of Clover (1898), and The Blue Moon (1904). Rather than a single continuous narrative, the book gathers a dozen or so independent stories unified by recurring themes: love tested by separation and disguise, the price of wishes granted, and the porous boundary between the everyday world and enchanted realms reached through wells, moons, mazes, and dreams. "Once in a Blue Moon" opens the collection, telling of Nillywill, a peasant-raised princess, and Hands-pansy, her childhood sweetheart, separated when she is restored to royal rank and betrothed against her will. Reunited briefly, the pair are carried off by a moon-fay's reindeer sledge during the rare rising of a blue moon, escaping earthly obligation to live together beyond the world's demands. "The Wishing-Pot" follows Tulip, a lovestruck youth who bargains with a witch to see his beloved—a girl known only by her green-slippered feet—inside a magic crystal bowl. Trapped within, he must literally catch and match her in an endless chase before winning her; escaping, he outwits the witch by trapping her in her own pot, sacrificing his own reunion with his beloved to free the witch's other captives, and is ultimately rewarded when his lost love proves to be an ailing princess he unknowingly restores. "The Way of the Wind" tells of Katipah, a poor, unloved girl who wins the West Wind, Gamma-gata, as a secret husband through her kite-flying, bears his child, and must publicly prove her marriage and her courage against a jealous, envious neighbor, ultimately being carried off by her husband while the neighbor's own cruelty and greed destroy her. A fragment titled "The Bound Princess" leads into "The Fire-Eaters," a linked multi-part tale following Noodle, the foolish son of two supremely wise parents, who feeds seven fire-spirits his burning house and is rewarded with a magic ring that sweetens all it touches. Through successive episodes—"The Galloping Plough," "The Thirsty Well," "The Princess Melilot," "The Burning Rose," and "The Camphor-Worm"—Noodle wins a magical plough, becomes lord of a well of thirsty water-spirits, and undertakes three perilous quests (stealing a rose from within a sleeping giant's dream, drawing breath from a monstrous worm in a poisonous lake) to break the fourfold enchantment binding the sleeping Princess Melilot, whom he ultimately marries. "The Rat-Catcher's Daughter" recounts how a greedy rat-catcher sells his beautiful daughter Jasomé to an underground gnome to be transformed into solid gold over three years, hoping to marry her to a prince; when her golden state disfigures rather than enhances her beauty and threatens her happiness, the gnome restores her, and the rat-catcher's own avarice ultimately traps him as he once trapped the gnome. "The Traveller's Shoes" follows Lubin, a cobbler who inherits a pair of magic red shoes from a murdered traveller and uses them to identify and punish the murderers, then travels to a kingdom where twelve princesses are losing their golden hair one by one to an enchantment; disguising his solution with cunning and self-sacrifice, he exposes the vain, treacherous eldest princess as the true cause and wins the youngest, Lyneth, as his bride. "The Rooted Lover" tells of a lowborn ploughboy who has himself magically transformed into a poppy so as to be near the Princess Fleur-de-lis he cannot otherwise approach; overlooked among rival blossoms, he is finally chosen and worn at a ball, where his jealous presence disrupts her betrothal to a foreign prince, and the Princess ultimately abandons rank to marry him in his true form. "The Wooing of the Maze" concerns Princess Rosemary, weary of loveless suitors, who has her gardener build an inescapable maze to test true worth, at the cost of his own lifelong imprisonment within it; twenty years later a clever prince navigates it using stilts rather than brute force, discovering the gardener has married and raised a daughter—the true "Princess"—inside, whom he weds. "The Moon-Flower" follows a disinherited prince who discovers Princess Berenice, a captive moon-maiden held by a lecherous gnome; the two marry, but she is transformed into a rooted flower to prevent her escape. Through patient devotion and the birth of a magical child, the family is eventually freed to journey between earth and moon. "The White King" is a darker tale of an unrequited queen who, coached by a fairy, murders a heart-whole minstrel and buries his heart to animate a statue of the king who once refused her love, only to have the statue's awakened heart drawn instead to the servant who genuinely loved and mourned him, leading to the queen's death and the reunited lovers' escape. The collection closes with "The Passionate Puppets," in which a cowherd, Killian, carves two marionettes infused with drops of his and his beloved Grendel's blood, whose performances of love and grief become uncannily lifelike; commercial pressure to coarsen the puppets' story for royal audiences culminates in the puppets' "deaths" onstage, after which Killian returns home poorer in money but richer in understanding to marry Grendel at last. Throughout, Housman's tales share a consistent moral architecture: devotion, patience, and self-sacrifice are rewarded, while greed, vanity, and cruelty are punished, often through poetic reversals in which the deceiver is caught by the deceiver's own trap.

By Laurence Housman · First published 1922 · Genre: Fairy Tale, Fantasy, Romance · 58,956 words

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This selection of fairy-tales is reprinted from the following original editions, now out of print:

_A Farm in Fairyland_ (1894) _The House of Joy_ (1895) _The Field of Clover_ (1898) _The Blue Moon_ (1904)

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A Doorway in Fairyland is listed on Textopian as a novel by Laurence Housman, dated 1922 CE.

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fantasy · fairy tales · magical · whimsical · adventure · enchanted · wonder · portal fantasy · magical world · children's literature · dreamlike · allegorical

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